


Signs of Life

by Wildgoosery



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, build-a-krav, gotta love those fantasy robots, some mild body horror just to warn you
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-28
Updated: 2017-08-28
Packaged: 2018-12-20 23:58:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11932053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wildgoosery/pseuds/Wildgoosery
Summary: She cups the light in one palm as it falters; lifts it to the sharp bow of her lips. "Kravitz," she says into the tingling hum of him. "I would have you join my court."Certain employees aren't hired so much as made.





	Signs of Life

1\. 

The Raven Queen personally assembles her retinue, because she can and because she chooses to. She distills them from the inside out, every knuckle and nerve and tendon of them, bone to muscle to fat to skin, a clutch of shining viscera nested in the belly. 

Or something like them anyway. She enjoys the aesthetic of a pulse, the clever mechanic of a diaphragm; she would never deny her charges the pleasure of a drunken fuck. But there's a messiness to the living that grows tiresome over centuries, so many thousands of meals and breaths, all of that food and oxygen in service of pretending to be mortal, and later, so much shit and carbon dioxide.

It's a little ridiculous to lavish this attention on their bodies, the jars she'll pour them into once they're ready. But they deserve to have a home between one monster and another, fleshy respites from the tools of bone or wood or crystal they'll use when they're at work.

They come to her freshly shucked from their lives, exhausted and out of sorts and unaware that they've been chosen. And she offers them a choice, in turn, which only a few take any time to consider. 

He arrives a flicker of light and confused impatience.

 _Have I been accused of a crime?_ he asks, wary, _Or were the cousins in Quillborough actually right for once?_

She chuckles and says, "Pardon?" Forms the words with the mouth and lips and tongue and larynx she's given herself for this occasion. It's a bother, but she finds it soothes new courtiers.

 _This isn't the Sea of Departed,_ he tells her. _So either I've hallucinated my own death, or my branch of the family has fallen so far out of your favor that I've been wrenched out of the order of things straight off._

She smiles, a strange and pleasant feeling. "I'm afraid you've got it twisted, my dear."

_Have I?_

She laughs, rough as a crow's call. "So informal!"

The light sharpens, defensive. _I'm not a cleric._

"No. But you were raised as one," she says. "Trained as one, until you left."

A long pause. _I am dead, then._

"You are," she agrees. 

_Stabbed, was it?_

"We'll discuss your rubric for selecting money lenders."

_Will we._

"I prefer that my servants be unencumbered."

Another, longer pause. A soul alone has little scope for expression, but she can hear the uncertain tremor in his shadow of a voice. _Serenity, are you asking me to serve you?_

She cups the light in one palm as it falters; lifts it to the sharp bow of her lips. "Kravitz," she says into the tingling hum of him. "I would have you join my court."

_Why?_

"You're good at finding things. People. Trouble, and a way back out of it." She curves her other hand around him, protective and affectionate. She describes the shape of what she would have him do; the bounty she would pay him for this grim and necessary work. She says, "You can refuse. I'm not one for conscription."

 _What aren't you telling me?_ he asks, dim with suspicion. _If I want to see my husband, my kids...what then? What's the limit of this?_

A frown creases her imagined brow. She says, "I would not dictate how you spend the time I pay you." She doesn't comment on the ragged history of such a choice, or the unlikelihood of what he surely hopes for. Certain truths cannot be told, only found through hard experience, and this is one of them.

 _Is there...do I need to SIGN something?_ A rueful flicker, the nearest he can manage to laughter. _Shine at it, maybe?_

"Speak the words," she says.

_How?_

"However they come to you."

 _All right._ The light prickles her fingers, her lips, defiant and afraid. _I accept. Serenity, my afterlife is yours._

"The contract is made," she says, delighted. And she pushes the light between her parted lips; holds it there, warm and weightless and waiting on her tongue.

She draws the shape of him with her hands, calcified trails of marrowless bone following her fingertips. She forms rough caricatures of organs -- heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, testicles, bladder -- and hangs them in place along his spine. She strings red ropes of muscle, taut and bundled; lays the underground of arteries, the filigreed map of veins; smooths her palms along flanks and stomach and thighs, a creamy plasterwork of fat in their wake. She pinches and pulls the details of his skin, pushes around lips and dimples until the likeness is there, handsome and a little worn; until the fresh brown clay of him has the feel of something lived in. She threads his scalp, his eyebrows, his chest, his arms; draws a soft line down his stomach which tangles it into coarse curls around his groin. 

She kisses him, deep and lingering, pushes and pours him out of her mouth and into his, across the threshold of their pact

His eyes stutter open. His lips part, tongue moving to form words that come out a creaky whisper. 

"You need to breathe first," she says to his rising panic.

The breath is clumsy and over-considered, but enough. "What the hell," he rasps. The second breath is even worse, and he coughs as he chokes on it. "What the fuck is this."

She cups one hand around his jaw. "It's yours," she says.

**Author's Note:**

> This will likely be a trilogy of small stories regarding the nature and history of my very favorite skeleton.
> 
> As always, THANK YOU to my pals on Twitter for encouraging this nonsense.
> 
>  
> 
> [@Wildgoosery](https://twitter.com/wildgoosery)


End file.
